FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Usb Microphone

Question:
If I have a USB microphone but no sound card, is it still possible to use Windows speech recognition?

Answer:
However, there is no such thing as a USB microphone. All microphones are analog. That is, they take your analog voice waves and send them down a wire as electrical impulses. A computer cannot recognize analog information. In the case of audio, a computer uses a sound card to convert the analog waves to a digital format the computer can understand. This sound card can be inside the computer in which case they are commonly called sound cards or sound chips. If this sound card is outside of the computer and connected by a USB cable, they are called USB microphones. These USB microphones have an analog to digital converter within them or on a separate pod. In effect, they are just microphones with a sound card that is connected to the computer with a USB cable. The advantage to this is that a sound card outside of the computer does not tend to pick up electronic noise from within the computer as the audio enters directly into the computer bus. We have been testing Windows® Speech Recognition for well over a year. In that time, we have totally disabled the onboard sound of a notebook computer and used Windows® Speech Recognition with a microphone connected to a USB sound pod.